NEW YORK — Twitter says government requests for user data grew sharply in the past six months as more countries asked for a greater amount of information about users.

More than half of the requests came from the United States.

Twitter Inc. said in a blog post Thursday that it received 2,058 requests from 54 countries in the first six months of the year, including from eight countries that had not previously submitted requests. In the last six months of 2013, the short messaging service received 1,410 requests, the majority of which also came from the U.S. Most Twitter users live outside the U.S.

In addition to account information queries, Twitter says it also received 432 requests to remove content, up 15 percent from 377 in the last six months of 2013.